A Shrine No Longer?

As I've mentioned from time to time, my current project at work is a book on the Civil War, which is a subject that I've visited a few times already. I'd never been particularly interested in the Civil War when I was in school, and despite an undergrad major and an MA in history, I never studied the conflict in any more detail than what's provided in a survey course. In more recent years, however, I've found my interest in the subject piqued far more than I ever expected. If somebody's got something interesting to say about the war, more often than not, I'm interested in hearing it.

So I was quite intrigued by an article a couple of days ago in The Washington Post. It seems that the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia, has fallen on hard times. The paper says that the museum did very well in the '90s but that recent years haven't been quite so successful. Attendance has fallen by about 50 percent since then, and the museum has been losing $400,000 a year for a decade.

Part of the problem may well be a new competitor in town, the American Civil War Center, which claims to examine the war from three different viewpoints: North, South, and black. Although the Museum of the Confederacy claims no longer to be the shrine to the Lost Cause that it once was, it does still seem to have it's own distinctive point of view. Is the museum facing lean times because that point of view isn't as popular as it once was? The Post speculates that this is part of the answer:

At its simplest, the saga of the museum is that of a historic institution trying to make its way in the modern age, a privately managed facility with a history of poor finances and a lack of parking, bedeviled by a world far more interested in roller coasters at Kings Dominion than in battle flags from Gettysburg.

But it's also about a historic shift in the mind-set of the white South, whose psychological underpinnings were held together for more than a century by the romantic ideal of "the lost cause" of the Confederacy.

That doesn't address all the implications of the museum's current status. Yes, historical memory does fade over time, but if the '90s were a boom time for the institution, ten years isn't enough time to start feeling historical distance. That would mean that 130 years after the Civil War ended ties and emotions were still strong, but 140 years is just too long to hold on to those same feelings. I think the end of the article, describing the shift in Southern demographics, may provide a better explanation.

[Charles Bryan, president of the Virginia Historical Society,] thinks the museum's fate is all part of the changing South. A century ago, he points out, nine out of 10 Virginians were born in the state. Today the percentage is about 52 percent, he says, and the new residents don't care as much about the mists of the distant past.

[Washington and Lee University history professor Theodore] DeLaney agrees. The Old South has been diluted, and the relics of its past, like the Museum of the Confederacy, have lost their mystique.

"Southerners are now Chicanos, they're from the Middle East, they're from the same immigrant groups that have been arriving in the North for 120 years," says DeLaney. "They're Northern whites who want to retire to warmer climes. . . . If white Southerners feel threatened, it's not from blacks. It's from the changing demographics."

It's not, he says, that there's a new antipathy toward the memory of the Confederacy. It's that, to many new Southerners, the Confederacy is irrelevant.

That would explain the sudden shift after a century and a quarter of devotion to the Lost Cause. In Confederates in the Attic, Tony Horwitz explores how the Confederacy and the Civil War is remembered in the South, but that book's almost ten years old itself, so maybe it's still talking about an outmoded attitude.

Here are a couple of questions for any Southern readers out there: Has there been a visceral change in how the War Between the States is remembered? Is the South a different place than it was ten years ago?